Apple reportedly leaked the existence of a new platform called "realityOS."
Ars Technica reports that references to realityOS started to appear on App Store upload logs in January; the company is also said to have referenced the platform in code uploaded to GitHub earlier this week. Independent developer Steve Troughton-Smith shared a screenshot:
Rumors about Apple's plans to enter the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) markets have been making the rounds for years now. The current thinking, according to Bloomberg, is that Apple plans to release a "high-end device" in this category sometime in 2022 or 2023.
It stands to reason that Apple would give the operating system used by this VR or AR headset its own name. That's been true of iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS, all of which are based on iOS; it's hard to believe Apple would suddenly abandon this naming convention for this device.
Companies often test new products that are never released, however, and there's no guarantee that making it as far as App Store upload logs or GitHub repositories means realityOS will ever become a, well, you know. (Or that Apple has settled on the "realityOS" moniker.)